“Eye-tracking” or “gaze-tracking” processes are used for identifying an object a user is looking at or determining where a user is looking. Current solutions use light reflected by the cornea of the user's eye (or further in the eye), such as infrared light, to track the direction of the user's eyes. These processes, however, are extremely power intensive and are therefore of limited use on devices operating on a restricted power supply, such as mobile computing devices.
Furthermore, eye/gaze tracking processes utilize captured image data. Mobile computing devices typically include image sensors having a viewpoint (i.e., the distance and angle from which the image sensor captures image data) separate from the display of the mobile computing device. For eye/gaze tracking processes to determine what a user is looking at on the display, they would use images captured via sensors disposed away from the display surface and thus away from the target of the user's gaze/focus, thereby limiting their accuracy.
Descriptions of certain details and implementations follow, including a description of the figures, which may depict some or all of the embodiments described below, as well as a discussion of other potential embodiments or implementations of the inventive concepts presented herein. An overview of embodiments of the invention is provided below, followed by a more detailed description with reference to the drawings.